We may not exactly count “one, two, three, many”, but we do lose ourselves as numbers become immense. I think most of us understand 100, but 1 million is hard, and anything higher does become “many”. We can easily visualize odds at “one in a hundred”, but “one in a million” is practical infinity .
Our vast outreach of instantaneous knowledge and awareness has jumbled that picture. Odds of winning a lottery may be “one in 372 million”, but – as my wife claims – “somebody always wins”. We hear about that somebody all the time. Hey, it could be me !
With the unusual reported more than the commonplace, our perception of odds becomes strangely distorted. If chances of anything are truly one in a million, then in a country like ours 360 people (each one interviewed in a media moment) will have it happen to them. In a planet of 8 billion, 8,000 folks will. Suddenly it seems like an awful lot of people. Translated to our own surroundings the odds suddenly appear as likely as 50 or more percent .
That’s why anecdotal “evidence” in medicine, science, or society is so damaging. An anecdote seems real, a statistic kind of nebulous. We think “oh, a person just like me was affected”. Winning, losing. Then we act stupidly .
My antidote has always been “how many people whom I actually know have had this happening?” That is quite sobering, and puts odds into much better perspective .
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 